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Final Cut Pro 4, Shake 3
chasingporsches writes "It appears that Apple released Final Cut Pro 4, Shake 3, and DVD Studio Pro 2. FCP4 has great new features, such as updated HD support, but unfortunately the usual hefty price tag ($999 full, $399 upgrade). Shake now has unlimited network rendering, and DVD Studio Pro 2 has a new basic/advanced user interface."
$999 is hefty? Have you priced an Avid system recently? One with all the features of FCP? Is one such even available?
I wonder how Adobe Encore DVD stacks up against DVD Studio Pro 2.
If you want to pay for your own laziness, feel free!. It takes nothing more than a little searching and trying out the Free OSS tools (yes, all of them if need be) available to do the job, and perhaps writing a few scripts to customise them to your workflow and you end up with a far more useful setup than simple one "mentally cheap" package that attempts to do it all.
You never spent a day working in a real television production environment have you? I'm not talking about CLI automating workflow/render farm type situations. I'm talking about digital compositing using DVCPRO video feeds directly, or the ability to edit and splice 24P HD and add real time effects.
Lemme guess, you're one of those guys that argues the Gimp is good enough and Photoshop is a waste of money too, right?
Unfortunately, lots of these PRO REAL WORLD production applications do not have OSS equivalents that are anything more than toys.
Adobe would charge a lot more for Premiere if it didn't suck in its entirety. If you never had to meet a deadline or didn't mind your project getting trashed all the time Premiere would be a great application. Their Mac port of it is especially poor, as is their port of After Effects which is a sad excuse for a professional application all on its own.
As for shake needing 4 times the hardware, there is where Apple's sales department kicks in. You buy Shake 3 and say Maya and they'll gladly sell you a rack of the cluster specific XServes that you can run mental ray and QMaster network rendering clients on.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.